ORANGE COUNTY STYLE : Plotting the O.C. novel

You can’t write a Southern novel without a mansion. A Western novel without a sheriff. A spy novel without a spy. OK, here’s a riddle: What can’t you write an Orange County novel without?

Wait a minute! you say. Orange County novel? Is there such a thing?

Yes, I say. Or almost. Or, to be mercilessly unbrief, there is beginning to be such a thing because there is beginning to be such a place. Many writers have lived here, but only recently has there been, to borrow from Gertrude Stein’s famous quip about Oakland, enough of a there here for a writer to work with.

The late Jessamyn West, probably the finest writer Orange County has so far produced, caught something essential about the predicament of the Orange County writer of a generation ago when she entitled her most ambitious work, a long novel about Orange County during World War I, “South of the Angels.� As late as 1960, when that novel was published, many East Coast reviewers understood neither California geography nor the Spanish language well enough to hear “South of Los Angeles� in the title.

The silent presence of Los Angeles in West’s Orange County novel--more about it later--is like the silent presence of the city in the names of today’s freeways. The San Diego, Santa Ana, San Bernardino, Ventura freeways are all named for the places you reach when you set out from the tacit starting point: Los Angeles.

Similarly, the overwhelming influence of the city complicates the work of any writer who would write from one of the provinces. Of course, if the province is remote enough, the writer may be in luck. Geographic isolation, when complete, forces people together and produces the creative friction that a writer requires.

But if the isolation is moderate, the “provincials� may be like family members who are gathered around the dinner table but looking out the window: no talk, no sparks struck, nothing for the writer to build on. Until recently, Orange County has been just such a place. Now, it is becoming another kind of place.

When there ws less congestion on the country roads, there was also, usually, too little density in the creative forces. Now, both traffic and literature are about to “go critical,� as nuclear engineers say.

But let us return to the question: What can’t you write an Orange County novel without? My list is short and perhaps strange, but, as I hope to show, quite defensible. You can’t write an Orange County novel without one or (preferably) more of the following six ingredients.

1. Religion. God may be dead on Sunset Strip. He is alive on Garden Grove Boulevard. Call this the Crystal Cathedral ingredient.

2. Real estate. I didn’t say land , I said real estate . Think of A.B. Guthrie’s Big Sky Country or Edna Ferber’s Mississippi Valley. A little nature mysticism of that sort goes a long way in a place like Newport Beach. By and large, land here always carries a price tag. Call this the Irvine Ranch ingredient.

3. Immigration . There are old-timers in Orange County just as there are old-timey spots such as downtown Orange or Mission San Juan Capistrano. But more, much more, of the Orange County story is that of newcomers and of what the newcomers are pursuing and/or fleeing. Call this the Green Card ingredient.

4. Paranoia. I didn’t say violence or danger or even fear . These occur in Orange County novels as they do in others, but paranoia in the Orange County novel is something different--exaggerated, out-of-control fear become a danger in itself. Call this the Ku Klux Klan ingredient.

5. Escapism . Escapism is paranoia’s ever-smiling flip side. In the Orange County novel, escapism is the dream of perfect happiness, cleanliness, universal friendliness and total security. Call this the Disneyland ingredient.

6. Family. Orange County is not singles country. It is not even couples country. It is family country. Family can be the supreme fantasy, but hte best Orange County novels make family the key to and the salvation of all the rest. Call this the Cosby ingredient.

Are there Orange County novels actually cooked up to this recipe? I have a checklist, now at about a dozen entries, but rather than talk of these, I prefer to talk of two forthcoming novels. Without officially reviewing them before publication date, I may nonetheless say that each of these books makes ambitious and colorful use of local settings and culture and is, in the sense just sketched, an Orange County novel.

Next spring, St. Martin’s Press will publish T. Jefferson Parker’s novel “Little Saigon.� Parker’s first novel was the well-received mystery “Laguna Heat,� now also a made-for-television movie. His new novel opens with a crime that becomes his lens on a variety of highly charged human relationships in the county.

The protagonist, Chuck Frye, “former second-best surfer of Laguna Beach,� is the scion of the family that owns “the vast Orange County Frye Ranch.� But for now, he is an underpaid, over-imbibing newspaper reporter who knows a lot about crime in Orange County thanks to his low-life buddies.

Chuck’s older brother, Bennett, is Abel to Chuck’s Cain. Bennett won all the prizes, athletic as well as scholastic, in school, and Bennett has long since won the exclusive affection of their father, Edison. But Bennett has lost something, too--his legs, in Vietnam.

The narrative begins as Chuck drives from Laguna Beach through Westminster to Little Saigon. He is en route to Asian Wind, a Vietnamese nightclub where all eyes are on Bennett’s beautiful Vietnamese wife, Li, who is about to sing:

Like children on a street of sorrow

Under skies that weep with tearful songs

We have Saigon forever

And Saigon is forever gone.�

Suddenly, the song is interrupted by gunfire, and when the commotion dies down, Li is gone, kidnapped. The untangling of the mysterious abduction becomes Chuck’s initiation into the wild fears and even wilder hopes of both the Vietnamese community and the Anglo community that surrounds it.

By my count, “Little Saigon� will have at least five of the six ingredients:

Family: The Fryes are brothres, bound by love and guilt as well as by property.

Escapism: Li is a Vietnamese Judy Garland who leaves all eyes misty and keeps alive the dream of a homeland over the Pacific rainbow.

Paranoia: Chuck finds that there are Americans in Orange County who need an enemy, badly, but there are also some Vietnamese here who have similar needs.

Immigration: An obvious major ingredient.

Real estate: The brothers are the youngest generation of a land-owning family, though the Frye attitude toward the ranch is decidedly unpatrician, nothing like, say, the attitude the O’Haras had toward their plantation in “Gone With the Wind.�

Religion: In this book, a missing ingredient.

Robert J. Ray, another Orange County mystery writer, has been encouraged by his publisher, also St. Martin’s Press, to reach for the richer subject matter that some critics believe is waiting in Orange County. Ray’s last two novels have been “Bloody Murdock� and “Murdock for Hire.�

Ray’s new book, to be published next February, is entitled “The Hitman Commeth.� If T.S. Eliot hadn’t gotten there first, it might havebeen entitled “Murder in the Cathedral,� the cathedral being--what else?--the Crystal Cathedral.

Actually, the central crime here is merely attempted murder and the cathedral of the novel is called the Great Cathedral. Still, it is made of glass and seats “at least ten thousand people ... Seats ... rose up from the floor to at leat four stories, and the ceiling soared above them.�

The protagonist of “The Hitman Cometh� is Frank Branko, “a homicide cop on the Newport Beach police force, forty-three, lean, lonely, tenacious, good at his job.�

Deep down, Branko would rather play tennis than fight crime, but he’s got just enough residual conscience to answer his beeper. What he learns when he phones in is that the Rev. Terry O. Williams, the Great Cathedral preacher, has been shot.

Robert Schuller by another name? No, the clergyman who takes the hit in “The Hitman� is a composite, who owes less to the author of “The Be-Happy Attitudes� than he does to the political ambitions of Pat Robertson and the baroque showmanship of Jim and Tammy Bakker.

But who dunnit? Williams’ wife and evangelical co-star, Sister Winona Lee, who is implacably opposed to his political plans and who suspects him, with reason, of infidelity? Or perhaps an armed band of Orange County mercenaries who would do credit to the gamiest ads in “Soldiers of Fortune?�

Let’s see how it stacks up, ingredient-wise.

Family? Yes (but see Escapism, below).

Escapism? Yes indeed. The ruling fantasy in “The Hitman Cometh� is a kind of eroticized dream of family--scrubbed, patriarchal respectability in the living room, pagan abandon in the bedroom and, surrounding it all, wave after wave of Christian applause.

Paranoia? Yes, though after a struggle this hobgoblin is defeated.

Immigration? No, not an ingredient in this novel.

Real estate? Suffice to say that the sexiest woman in “The Hitman Cmeth� is a certain Susannah Maxwell, whose thoughts at one point run as follows: “To make the $81,000 mortgage payment, Susannah would have to instruct her broker to sell off more stock. She leafed through some spreadsheets. At today’s prices ...� Only in the Orange County novel can a sexual superstar think this way.

Religion: Yes, in the most obvious sense, but there are no sermons, sincere or insincere, in the novel. This is a political thriller in which the politician merely happens to be a preacher. He is a survivor, however, and after recovering from his wounds, (take note, Pat Robertson watchers) he wins the election.

While awaiting publications of these novels, you might look, as I have lately, into two long-forgotten Orange County novels that deserve revival, I refer to “Cress Delahanty� and “South of the Angels,� both by Jessamyn West.

In “Cress Delahanty,� West not only wrote what must be one of a very small number of novels set on an orange ranch but also created in the Delahanty family one of the most touching, amusing, altogether lovable families in American literature.

The Fullerton high school girl for whom the novel is named is as funny and as preposterously adolescent as Bill Baxter in Booth Tarkington’s “Seventeen,� and as delicately sad--at least when West is in top form--as any Irish country girl in an Edna O’Brien story.

West, who died in 1984 at the age of 82, is best remembered for a collection of stories, “The Friendly Persusasion,� which became a William Wyler movie starring Gary Cooper. These stories reflect tales she heard from her mother about life among Southern Indiana Quakers late in the 19th Century.

What “The Friendly Persuasion� with its unique blend of the quaint and the piquant was to contribute to West’s less well-known but more important California work was religious vividness in certain key characters, such as LeRoy Raunce, the preacher in “South of the Angels,� a man who had “a faculty very rare in the human race--he was born with a sense of gratitude. Thankfulness flowed out from him, washed over pine planks, crude oil, Jersey cows, applesauce, daybreak, nightfall, the marriage bed, the Acts of the Apostles and everything between, behind, before, after, under and above those items. He relished the Santa Ana dust in his hair and the hauled water with which he washed it out.�

As for real estate, West captures the romance of Orange County’s version of the thing. From “South of the Angels�again: “Shel, on the Tract, was like a man seeing for the first time the naked body of the woman he loves; seeing what before he has only guessed, the long, clean lines, the sun-flushed simplicity, the grave starkness.� If that isn’t romance, what is? But Shel isn’t looking at Saddleback Mountain or the mighty Pacific. He is looking at an Orange County tract.

When it comes to local paranoia, West notices it but always in passing and usually with a faint smile. In “South of the Angels,� set, as noted, during the First World War, some of the ranchers are laying in arms. The Germans, they have no doubt, are organizing Mexico for an invasion. It’s just a matter of time.

Regarding immigration, West’s work is a reminder that California, white California, was peopled mostly by immigration from the American Midwest, from places like her own Southern Indiana. For most of those immigrants, America’s hope had already turned to bitter disappointment at least once. Orange County fears have some of the desperation of the last chance.

As for escapism, here in the mother county of the American theme park, that epochal engine of jollity, it is a relief of a sort to go back 70 yeasr and follow the simpler fancy and wiser folly of Cress Delahanty, who decides that she needs a “trademark� to succeed in high school and that “craziness� is the most promising one to be had.

And, finally, as for family, read what happens to Cress when her experiment with craziness goes awry and she ends up in tears because nobody takes her seriously anymore. Mrs. Delahanty starts toward Cress’ room:

“She didn’t know what she would or could say when she got there. Maybe, ‘Cress, people like you and your father have to try on more than one way of being and doing to see who you are. And you’re bound to make mistakes.’ Maybe she would say, ‘My sweet sensible daughter.’ But she would surely hug her and kiss her. Her arms, as she heard through the closed door those catching sobs, already felt that stocky body grow quiet. She opened the door and said, ‘Cress, honey.�’

That is how--then or now--you write a novel in Orange County.